Why Donald Trump won't save the Mainstream Media

This time is different.

I spent two decades in mainstream media — most recently at CNN and the Washington Post. I know just how bad things have gotten there — and how the future really is in independent journalism. This is a journey and I need your help to make it to my goal. Now more than ever we need voices that call it how they see it, without fear or favor. I promise to always be an authentic and honest voice. Please join me!

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, it was an absolute shock to the system.

There were marches in protest. People moved out of the country. There was a surge in demand for mental health services.

But know who Trump’s win was very good for? The mainstream media.

In the three weeks after the election, the New York Times added 132,000 paid subscribers. On the day after the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that orders and new subscribers were up 300 percent. CNN made $1 billion in profit in 2016, the most in the thirty-plus year history of the network.

After years of declining circulation, subscriptions and ratings, Trump seemed to be a blessing from the news gods. No one felt neutrally about him — and people who hated him consumed even more content about him than those who loved him.

Trump, ever the savvy media consumer, noted the surge. “Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there,” Trump said in 2017. “Because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”

He wasn’t wrong! As the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi noted in March 2021:

After a record-setting January, traffic to the nation’s most popular mainstream news sites, including The Washington Post, plummeted in February, according to the audience tracking firm ComScore. The top sites were also generally doing worse than in February of last year, when the pandemic became a major international news story.

The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26 percent from January to February, and 7 percent from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17 percent compared with January and 16 percent over last February.

And it’s only gotten worse since. As the Washington City Paper reported this past spring of the Washington Post:

Post website traffic took a nosedive from about 140 million visits in April 2020, dropping pretty steadily to now less than 55 million, according to the most recent numbers obtained by City Paper, which are not published on the Post’s site. That’s a 60 percent drop in just a few years.

So, you might assume, that whatever journalists thought about the 2024 victory of Donald Trump in a moral sense, they might well cheer it — behind closed doors — from a business perspective.

Well I’ve got news for them: Donald Trump isn’t going to save the mainstream media this time.

While there are isolated cases — Slate’s subscriptions reportedly surged post-Trump win — there are very few signs that a second Trump term will trigger the same surge in web traffic, ratings and subscriptions for mainstream media that his first four years in office did.

This, from Politico, is daunting on that front:

On TV, after beating CNN on election night for the first time ever, MSNBC saw its audience plummet: In the six days after the election, Democrats’ favorite network tumbled from its 2024 prime time average by 36 percent. CNN was off by 19 percent. During the same period, Fox exceeded its typical 2024 number by 56 percent.

Some mainstream media types insist this is a temporary blip. That, yes, traffic and ratings — with the notable exception of Fox News — are down right now but that’s simply because everyone who didn’t want Trump to win is taking a break. And that, after the holidays, the resistance to Trump will return — and people will want accountability and investigative coverage of him. And that will mean a return to mainstream media — be it cable TV or digital outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times.

I don’t believe that — for one big reason: The 2024 election was the last gasp of the dying mainstream media. With each successive election, the mainstream media will have less and less influence. The flattening of the content world means that people can find information — good information! — and analysis in a WHOLE lot of places. YouTube. Substack. Instagram. TikTok. Podcasts. These are the new media vehicles.

Don’t believe me? Let’s run through a few examples of how people consumed news this election.

One in 5 adults say they now get their news from “news influencers” primarily in some form of social media. For those under 30 years of age, that number is almost double.

This, from the Wall Street Journal, is also revealing:

Two weeks ago, Donald Trump sat down with the podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours, an episode that drew more than 45 million views on YouTube and over 25 million listens across Spotify and other platforms. On election night, Rogan was among several podcast hosts who got shout-outs in Trump’s victory celebration.

It underscored what the 2024 presidential race made clear: A new media landscape has emerged. The traditional gatekeepers of political discourse—TV networks and newspapers—are shrinking in influence as Americans turn to many more outlets for information….

…TV news remains a massive draw for Americans in the biggest moments. But younger audiences have fled, and there were signs even on election night of an overall erosion in the medium. The main three cable channels were down 32% in viewership collectively compared with 2020, to around 21 million, with CNN losing almost half its audience.

And the chart that went with the story speaks to the rapid growth of podcasting:

Speaking of compelling charts about the downfall of the mainstream media, consider this:

And this:

So, yeah.

The declines are not solely the result of changing consumption habits among younger age groups either. They are also reflective of the long — and worsening — distrust people have in the mass media:

What’s happening then is the confluence of TWO massive cultural shifts:

1. The media landscape has totally flattened. The rise of Substack, YouTube, X — and all the rest — means anyone can be an information conduit. Gatekeeping what people hear and see and read is dead.

2. Distrust of institutions — including the media — is rampant. People simply no longer believe that big companies — whether they are news organizations or banks or VC firms or whatever — are worthy of their trust. They believe big companies are up to no good.

The coming-together of those two cultural streams spells nothing good for mainstream media. There are more outlets than ever before providing news and analysis at the exact moment when people are turning away from the mainstream media because they believe it has failed them.

I think, that people — even dispirited Democrats — will come back to news soon enough. But I am highly doubtful they come back to news as served up by mass media outlets.

Where will they go instead? News influencers, for lack of a better word. People who are creating news and news-adjacent content on YouTube, Substack, Instagram and TikTok.

In truth, it’s already very much headed in that direction. The New York Times recently published a profile on Substack leaning into politics that is insightful about the growth of the platform.

Here’s the key part:

In the politics and news categories, more than 30 publishers earn at least $1 million annually, according to the company. These operations range in size from one employee to dozens….

...That isn’t translating into profits for Substack. Its four-million-strong paid digital subscription base exceeds that of influential publications like The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. But Substack, which brings in money by taking a 10 percent cut of each publisher's earnings, generates less revenue per customer than those publications.

To which I would say this: That isn’t translating into profits for Substack….yet.

As the pace of mainstream media’s collapse quickens — and there’s lots of evidence that is happening as we speak — credible platforms that allow individual content creators to a) build brand and b) monetize that brand will become the coin of the realm.

That revolution, I think, is underway — and picking up speed. At this point, I don’t see what mainstream media can do, realistically, to stop the change in how — and where — people want to consume information. Their beach houses are going to drift into the ocean — the only real question is when.

All of which means that not even an attention machine like Donald Trump can save mainstream media this time.